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What Is Deontology?, Part Two: Reasons to Act Gerald F. Gaus

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What Is Deontology?, Part Two: Reasons to Act Gerald F. Gaus What is Deontology?, Part Two: Reasons to Act a Gerald F. Gaus Part One of this essay considered familiar ways of characterizing deontology, which focus on the notions of the good and the right. Here we will take up alternative approaches, which stress the type of reasons for actions that are generated by deontological theories. Although some of these alternative conceptualizations of deontology also employ a distinction between the good and the right, all mark the basic contrast between deontology and teleology in terms of reasons to act. 1. Deontology as a Distinctive Ethical Response Teleology, it will be recalled, is commonly defined as a theory in which the only right-making properties are good-promoting properties, while deontology is characterized by any other theory. We saw in Part One, however, that it is difficult to distinguish good-promoting rightness from other right-making properties. This problem stems from the common characterization of all worthy, desirable, or normatively favorable properties as good. If we cannot adequately distinguish them, perhaps the most familiar method of characterizing deontology is unhelpful. One way to solve this problem is to develop a specific characterization of goodness or value, so that we have conceptual room to speak of what is right but not good-promoting. a Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 35 (2001): 179-193. Another way, suggested by H.A. Prichard, is to distinguish between the good and the right in terms of the directives they yield: the good attracts our desires while the right tells us what we must do. A different proposal for solving this problem has recently been advanced by Phillip Pettit and others. It retains a very broad conception of value of goodness, covering the full range of the normative, and then characterizes teleology and deontology as different ways of responding to value. According to Pettit, a consequentialist believes that “the proper way to respond to any values recognized is to promote them: that is, in every choice set to select the option with prognoses that mean it is the best gamble with those values.”1 In contrast: The deontological approach takes a certain universal value — say, the respecting of such and such rights — as given and argues that institutions should be shaped in a way that bears witness to this value, honoring it punctiliously in the treatment they give to different human beings. In particular, institutions should be shaped to honour the value even if this means, as a result of various side-effects, that there is less of the value overall: even if it means that in general other agents respect people’s rights less well than they might have been brought to.2 In a similar vein, S.I. Benn distinguished responding to value by maximizing or promoting it from respecting it. As Benn argued, someone who professes to value, say, a great art work, but saw no reason to refrain from ridiculing it or using it to weigh down garbage, would not be respecting the value.3 If to respect something is to give “appropriate consideration or recognition to some feature” of it in our deliberations about what to do, it seems inappropriate to treat a valued work thus, and so is disrespectful.4 This view of deontology avoids making a basic distinction between good or value properties and other, non-good, right-making, properties. The distinction between teleology and deontology is not about two sorts of right-making considerations, but two different responses to the same property — value. The distinction between teleology and deontology is located in the sphere of our reasons for action: specifically, the opposition of promoting and honoring or respecting reasons. 2. Respect for Persons This is certainly an insight. However, the worry about this proposal as a general way of distinguishing deontology from teleology is that deontologists typically do not understand promotion and respect to be two different ways of responding to the same things, but different ways of responding to different things. Writes Benn: A contrast familiar in the philosophical literature is that between deontological theories of ethics, with their corresponding reasons for action, and teleological theories and their corresponding reasons. I shall work with a related but somewhat different distinction, between reasons of respect and reasons of concern, the former being person-centered, the latter value-centered. Reasons of concern look primarily to the good consequences of an action, to whether it will bring about or preserve some valued and valuable state of affairs, sustain some valued and valuable activity, or promote the survival and well-being of some valued and valuable object. Such objects, which I call axiotima (things to be valued), may be animate or inanimate.5 Although Benn allowed that in some cases we might distinguish respecting a value from promoting it, his position was that, by and large, maximization is the appropriate response to valued objects. However, while values are normally best promoted, persons are to be respected. “Person-centered reasons have to do with principles, such as freedom, justice, equal respect for a person’s rights, and fidelity to truth inasmuch as we are committed to these principles in our dealings with any other person, simply in virtue of that person being a person....The notion of a natural person is fundamental to such principles.”6 Our reasons for action differ, argued Benn, because they are based on different sorts of moral objects. It seems, then, that deontologists distinguish different responses to ethical properties because, at the heart of their view, fundamental differences between types of ethical properties mandate different responses from us. A unifying element of most contemporary deontological theories, and one sense in which they are all Kantian, is a commitment to respect for persons: our ethical response to persons is held to be qualitatively different than our ethical response to things.7 Confronting valuable things, the proper response is to promote them, and maximize the goodness in the world that results from them. When confronting persons the proper response is respect and restraint; to act on principles or rules that indicate, in our dealings with such creatures, we are not free to pursue good-promoting projects without restraint. Thus the idea that we are to treat persons not simply as means to the production of value but as ends. Given the wide acceptance of this idea in recent ethics, it can be argued that most moral theories qualify as deontological. Will Kymlicka provides a case that plausible versions of utilitarianism are grounded on a notion of equal consideration of interests or equal concern and respect. Kymicka thus believes that not only Kant’s and Rawls’s moral theory, but those of utilitarians such as such as R..M. Hare, Peter Singer, John Harsanyi, Sidgwick and even Bentham are “deontological in that they spell out an ideal of fairness or equality for distinct individuals.”8 The idea of autonomy has a complex relation to respect for persons and deontological ethics.9 For Kant, autonomy was necessary to account for what he calls the “realm of ends” and the requirement that every rational being “should treat himself and all others never merely as means but in every case as an end in himself.”10 Our autonomy is part of our rational nature; it is both what allows us to be guided by duty and that which grounds our dignity. Autonomy thus understood is the supposition of our status as moral agents, and grounds the idea that we are to be respected rather than valued. For rational autonomous agents are capable of setting ends for themselves, and it is the mutual recognition of each other as rational self-legislators that constitutes respect. Respect, then, is the upshot of a mutual recognition of autonomous agents. Autonomous agents do not inevitably value each others’ autonomy as a good to be promoted; they recognize autonomy as a rational status to be acknowledged. However, in recent ethical theory autonomy is typically seen as a valued state, a condition to be cherished or promoted. Understood thus autonomy is no longer the basis of respect, but generates instead reason to promote and cherish. Consequentialist thinkers may embrace this contemporary idea of autonomy. 3. Deontology and Rules For Benn and for Kant, treating persons with respect requires acting according to maxims or principles of a certain sort. Benn maintains that person-centered reasons are inherently principled reasons, while for Kant respect demands acting according to maxims that can be universalized. “There is, therefore, only one categorical imperative. It is: Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”11 Deontology is thus typically understood as upholding “Kant’s (and commonsense) view that the moral rightness of an act is its property of being in accordance with a moral rule or principle.” 12 Right action is a function of the maxim on which it is based rather than the results which it yields. This feature of deontology has led some, such as R.B. Brandt, to equate it with formalism in ethics. According to formalists, “something besides consequences is important for rightness or wrongness; sometimes, they say, the fact that the act satisfies some formal condition, or has a certain property, such as the property of being the fulfillment of a promise, determines that it is right or wrong.”13 C.D. Broad endorsed a formalistic view according to which an act’s rightness partly depends on its “fittingness.”14 The formal property typically associated with deontological theories is conformity to rules, principles, or maxims. Of course, not all deontologists explain rightness in terms of conformity to rules: some insist that recognizing the property of rightness is inherently particularistic.15 Indeed, it has been common to distinguish act and rule deontology.
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